Re: SW VA Harmon/Harman-Maxwell Connections
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In reply to:
Re: SW VA Harmon/Harman-Maxwell Connections
Janet Brown 8/20/11
Right!I've learned from experience that "died unmarried" is often "code" for "I can't find a marriage for him/her," or "I can't find any evidence of a marriage or heir, so I assumed he/she died unmarried."In this case I have two problems with Rebecca, daughter of Matthias.First I cannot find any confirming evidence that Matthias even had a daughter named Rebecca.Second, I cannot find any primary or contemporaneous evidence confirming that she died unmarried.
Most of the children of Matthias and Lydai (Skaggs) Harman are named in the estate papers of Moses Skaggs, filed in Green County, KY.But not Rebecca.One could, I supposed interpret her absence to mean that she died without heirs.But you could also argue that she was not listed if no one knew where she was, when she died, or who her heirs were.
Now it turns out that Thomas Maxwell was living at the head of the Clinch River about 1778, when I estimate he married Rebecca.AND ALSO living at the head of the Clinch River about that time were brothers Matthias and Valentine (both sons of Adam), AND their cousin, Jacob Harman Jr (m. Sarah Lorton) and his family.Soon after Thomas Maxwell married Rebecca he apparently moved south to somewhere along the head of the Holston River to put a little more distance between the Indians and his young family.That's (the Holston River) where Thomas Maxwell was when Thomas Ingle raised the alarm about the capture of his family from Burke's Garden in 1782.
In an interesting incident that occurred in 1774, Thomas Maxwell and Israel Harman (son of Jacob Jr., named after his grandfather, Israel Lorton) were the designated scouts of Captain/Major Daniel Smith, and they got into a lot of trouble when they moved the Jacob Harman family back to the New River area to get them out of the danger of Indians, instead of doing the scouting mission they were assigned.
If you go to posting #62 of the Lorton forum of GenForum, dated 3 Feb 2000, you will find a listing of the children of Jacob and Sarah (Lorton) Harman/Harmon by Richard Davis.I have not been able to make contact with Richard Davis, and he did not cite any of his sources.But I have, so far, confirmed about 1/2 of the information he posted, so I know he had done his homework and research.In this listing of children there is a "gap" among the births of those children from ca. 1760 to ca. 1767 - just right for a daughter named Rebecca to be theorized who was born ca. 1762 (my best estimate for the birth of Rebecca (Harman?) Maxwell-Hays).
Finally, I'm tracking down and finding that there is an interesting and most confusing relationship between the Thompson, Skaggs, and Lorton families, i.e., they are all closely related by marriage, and by extension, this includes both branches of the Harman family.Rebecca (Harman?) Maxwell-Hays named her second son Thomas Thompson Hays!Whether its just a coincidence that she gave this second son this somewhat unusual name while the Thompson-Harman connections are hanging out there, I simply do not know at this point.